The rationale and implementation of model-based precision medicine for inflammatory diseases

The contents of this book represent a new way of looking at the role of inflammation in the balance between health and disease and present a series of advanced computational methods applied with an awareness of system-level consequences toward an explicit translational goal. Grounded in the fundamentals of scientific investigation, Translational Systems Biology brings with it the reminder that the quest to improve human health involves being able to effectively intervene on the processes that generate health and disease. Furthermore, the foundational properties of inflammation that challenge the traditional and neo-traditional research community, namely complexity and nonlinearity of structure and dynamics, also necessarily scale to the level of that community itself. As a result, the implementation of Translational Systems Biology not only provides a pathway toward discovering and engineering new and better therapies for specific disease processes but also represents a therapeutic paradigm shift for an increasingly ailing and insufficient biomedical research structure. We call this paradigm shift model-based Precision Medicine in order to contextualize this approach within the prevailing notions of how to implement Precision Medicine.